philh

For assertive-but-weak, the example that’s coming to mind is Brendan Fraser’s character at the start of Bedazzled (a mediocre film). He tries to playfully tease his coworkers, he invites himself to their plans; but his body language says he’d run away if you looked at him funny, and he’s scared to talk to his crush.

Or if X is “this person is incompetent” and Y is “this person is arrogant”, then the sweet spot is “competent but humble” and the overlap is “arrogant and incompetent”. That seems entirely achievable.

npm install gave out a lot of warnings about outdated packages, I don’t know if they were talking about my preexisting environment or about something in the LW2 repo.

npm start took over half an hour before I went away, and when I came back many hours later it seemed to be stuck in a loop of constantly retrying something that was throwing an error.

I will also take a moment to grump that prestart_lesswrong.sh installs meteor, which I would rather have done myself (and which I wouldn’t have done through curl | bash). Still, I understand that having an easy setup makes people more likely to contribute, so I won’t grump too much. I would have appreciated a warning though, or a separate npm install_deps script or something.

I think London has a lot of potential that I sometimes worry is going untapped because I’m not a great organiser. But our assets include:

Meetups that currently draw 15+ people more often than not

A group house that sometimes hosts those meetups (and has also hosted two secular solstices)

An EA community that seems to be fairly vibrant

In terms of serious organisations, I’m not sure if Deep Mind counts but it feels at least adjacent? And for people who want to do politics-related things, it surely doesn’t hurt that we’re the seat of the UK government.

I mean, there’s a plausible story where the fact you haven’t heard about them is part of the problem: if someone else had done the things, maybe you would have heard without them having to make a deliberate effort to seek praise.

It also sounds like part of the problem is that even when people praise Brent, when they have the option of giving him support, job offers, etc. they don’t, and so praise by itself feels meaningless. So, even if you had heard of these things, what could you offer?

My food example doesn’t feel to me like the food is particularly close to the networking. Which is to say, I agree with your last sentence.

(I don’t feel like I’m trying to propose a definition here, just gesture vaguely at a cluster and some features of it that seem relevant. Similarly, I don’t have particular feelings about your proposed definition. Most of my comment might have been better directed as a reply to someone else.)

He found himself wanting them before ever getting any (so it’s not that he got some, found that he enjoyed getting them, and wanted them for the sake of that enjoyment).

He found out they existed by getting one.

Regardless, this feels like not quite the thing. It’s not that he didn’t enjoy getting them. It’s that he was trying to learn French, and now suddenly instead he was trying to earn achievements in “learning French”. No matter how much he liked those achievements, they got in the way of actually learning French.

With that in mind, I think the answer to “is food a lotus” would be: for some people, in some contexts, yes.

Like, if I go to a networking event intending to meet people, but instead I spend all my time gorging myself at the buffet.

I had a goal, and the food meant that instead of working towards my goal, now I’m doing something that won’t help it at all. If food is sufficiently lotus-like for me, I might need to completely avoid networking events with buffets. This is true even if I actually really enjoy food, and endorse that enjoyment in general.

Only if you say “getting a license is great and worth sacrificing for, but I haven’t bothered” will people notice the apparent contradiction and downweight your opinion

I don’t think I’d have the anti-hypocrisy flinch in that situation. I’d have it if they say “everyone should get a license, if you don’t you’re just lazy” and fail to acknowledge that they don’t have one themself.

(If I know they know I know they don’t have a license, there may be no need to explicitly acknowledge it. Then the statement becomes self deprecating.)

The post talks about hypocrisy “as specifically referring to an inconsistency between words and actions”, but it also talks about the anti-hypocrisy flinch, and it’s not at all clear to me that the flinch is caused by the thing that’s being defined as hypocrisy. Maybe I’m atypical in this regard.

It seems the “all” page has no indication of whether a post is frontpage/​featured/​user blog, and doesn’t include meta posts. Would you be open to adding those? I think those would cause me to switch, I really like GW in general.

(Though I do also like the reading times given on LW.com, and the read/​unread status indication.)

I’m no expert on reading people, and have never met Conor or interacted with him much. But if you’d asked me in advance whether Conor would delete his entire posting history, upon deciding LW2 wasn’t for him, I would have said that seemed very unlikely.

And combined with other recent events which I’m not sure how public they are, I worry that something more is happening.

(I do have a minor good sign that the virtue of silence compels me not to reveal.)

I’m reminded of the time I had a corrupt filesystem image and wanted to uncorrupt it. It turns out you can just read the filesystem specs and follow the data and see exactly what’s gone wrong and where. In this case I only had to change I think one byte before I could successfully mount the filesystem.

The thing that had changed that one byte had also changed many others, so I don’t think I got any value from the recovered filesystem. But I still felt powerful and wizardly in a way that I don’t often, even as a programmer (even running Gentoo Linux on my home computer).

(“Even” makes it sound like I tink programmers are more powerful than others, but I mean more “despite that programming is similar along many axes to this thing”.)

This was a FAT32 filesystem, and I expect a modern filesystem would be a lot harder to do that with, which is a shame. Years later, I also had an unsuccessful attempt to do something similar with an audio file.

Ah, I forgot that “the case of the baseball card” is actually two cases. I think you’re right about the case where Beth gets given a new card; if there are lots of Beths, there’s a large net utility gain. But I don’t think that works in the case where Adam’s card gets given to one of the Beths; the loss to him is still close to the market value of the card.

It seems plausibly true if we think only of the cases where… something like “A loses power because B gets something they want, but A’s circumstances ignoring B are unchanged”. But I don’t immediately trust that to be a sensible set of cases to think about, in more complicated scenarios.

I’m not sure how true the stronger claim is. In the case of the baseball card, the opportunity cost to Adam is almost as much as the price Beth is willing to pay. And that seems like it’s going to be, not universally true but common; the higher the benefit to B, the more A is capable of extracting from them, and so the higher the cost of losing that ability.

A point in favor would be that blocking a fake Pareto improvement probably has social costs that also rise with the benefit to B.

The thing you’re talking about is called Kaldor-Hicks efficiency and I think you’re right that these situations will usually be Kaldor-Hicks improvements.

There’s some discussion of these over on reddit. I’m wary of equivocating between the two, for reasons pointed at in that comment thread: even if it would be theoretically possible to turn a Kaldor-Hicks improvement into a Pareto improvement, in practice that might be difficult.